Over on the Windows Vista Team blog, Mike Nash has Announced the RTM of Windows Vista SP1. Really good news!! But then I re-read his post more carefully. While SP1 is "released", it may not be ready for prime time. Mike confides that "Our beta testing identified an issue with a small set of device drivers. These drivers do not follow our guidelines for driver installation and as a result, some beta participants who were using Windows Vista and updated to Service Pack 1 reported issues with these devices."
So what was Microsoft's response? RTM it anyway.
It seems to me that Mike has just confirmed that SP1 is not really ready for release albeit with a small number of issues. Would you want to have to hope that one of these unspecified devices are ones you'll have in your corporate estate? While the number of drivers may be small,when SP1 is really ready, then I'll start looking at it. At a minimum, rather than just waffle on with marketing weasel words, where's the list of broken drivers?
There's only one reason Microsoft decided to RTM this and it's called Marketing.Next week we see the Launch of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, along with the vaporware known hopefully as SQL Server 2008. The pressure to declare Vista SP1 as RTM prior to the big events must have been high. IMHO, it's not a good justification! SP1 is vital, in our market at least, to create some faith that Vista is ready for our customers. Now you are suggesting we need and SP1 for SP1 - what were you guys thinking?
To help Mike, on the team blog comment page, I provided an entry for the Visa SP1 FAQ:
Q: When will SP1 be released?
A: When it's ready or when marketing decides to release it.
I should probably sign this as "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells" even though I don't live there.
{Later}
Looks like I'm not the only person that thinks less than positively about the release of SP1. Paul Thurrot also believes that software should be delivered when it's ready and not before.
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